President Joe Biden was met with his first boos of the night at his State of the Union address when he characterized the 2017 Republican tax cuts as benefiting the top 1% of earners.
Biden, speaking before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, lauded the passage of his partisan $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan while taking a swing at the tax overhaul legislation passed under his predecessor’s administration.
“And unlike the $2 trillion tax cut passed in the previous administration that benefited the top 1% of Americans, the American Rescue Plan helped working people — and left no one behind,” Biden said to fierce booing from the Republican side of the dais.
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According to an August 2021 report from the Congressional Budget Office, the tax cuts didn’t just benefit the wealthiest in the country. The nonpartisan CBO found that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act reduced taxes across the board, lowering the average federal tax rate from 20.8% to 19.3% for all filers.
Additionally, from 2017 to 2018 — the year after the so-called Trump tax cuts were passed — the bottom 20% of earners saw their average federal tax rate fall from 1.2% to nearly zero. The top 1% of filers saw a bigger reduction, 1.5 percentage points, but paid the highest effective federal tax rate of any income group.
The 2017 tax cuts have been used as a cudgel by Democrats who claimed they were passed to benefit the wealthy. The corporate tax rate sat at 35% from 1993 until it was lowered to 21% in 2017 as part of the Republican tax cuts.
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Biden had hoped to raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% as part of his agenda. He had also proposed nearly doubling the capital gains rate for high-income individuals to 39.6%. Both of those proposals fell flat as centrist Democrats wavered on increasing taxes and spending as the country recovers from the pandemic and inflation.
